I’m sure everyone in Ireland has heard about the robbery in Holycross Abbey Thurles, Co Tipperary this week. I couldn’t believe it when I read the details of the robbery. They broke into the abbey at 5pm on Tuesday evening with a hammer, screw driver and angle grinder.I thought initially they cut one of the crosses from its stand with the angle ginder but from what I have read it appears that they used the angle grinder to cut open the steel door of the display cabinet protecting the cross.

The two crosses were only 30cm in height so very easy to take. I thought the crosses were stolen for the metals scrap value but having looked into the size and the metals of each cross I’m not sure if that’s the case. One of the crosses was solid silver which although valuable as scrap would perhaps be more valuable intact, considering it was a 14th century reliquary. The other cross is bronze and gold, but it sounds like the bulk of the cross was executed in bronze and then it was finished or plated with gold. Either way it doesn’t sound like a huge quantity of gold and not worth the risk . This is only me speculating… I’m not familiar with the mark up or overheads for robbery! It’s an awful loss to the church who had housed the pieces since the 12th century. As a maker I hate to think craftsmanship like this would be destroyed.

Silver Cross, Holycross Abbey

So much silver and gold gets scraped these days due to high prices being paid for scrap metal. I completely understand people cashing in their old jewelry for cash but it’s horrible to see pieces like this being scrapped. If you find yourself with some old silver or gold be sure to get it valued first. You’d never know it might be worth more sold intact than for scrap and at least this way the piece survives for someone to admire.

Resurrection Angel St FinBarre's Cathedral

Hopefully there will be a happy ending to this story and the two crosses will be returned to the abbey intact. A similar thing happened in Cork city when the gold horns were removed from the gold leaf Resurrection Angel statue that sits on the roof of St. Finbarres Cathedral. This is a beautiful cathedral which I know well since I attended the art college across the road from it. The story goes that the angel will sound the horns out over the city on judgement day! Anyway these were cut from the angel but following an appeal were returned to the cathedral where they were restored and returned to their rightful place.

Every time I write the word ‘jewellery’ in this blog a nasty red line appears under it telling me I’m spelling it incorrectly. I’m sure most people are thinking, a minor annoyance but look at my little word bubble thingy.

Wordle Cloud

The word jewellery comes up a lot in my blog posts. (You can make your own word bubble on Wordle.net. It takes your website and compiles this image from all the words you use, the size of the word is determined by how frequently it is used.)

While I was writing this mornings post I had the same spell check problem with jewellery. So I’ve shelved that post for the moment and I’m going to find out who spells jewellery, jewelry and why?!

It turns out that it’s the American spelling that’s playing havoc with my spell check. Which is a bit annoying considering they are the only English speaking country that spell it this way, Canadians are happy to leave well enough alone!

Fear not all my American readers, I don’t blame your country. The blame lies with one man, Mr Noah Webster. Webster was an American writer who took it upon himself to reform the American school system. His aim was to

rescue our native tongue

as he believed the English language has been corrupted by the British aristocracy. A by product of this was the movement he led demanding simplification of word spelling. And of course my much used word jewellery fell victim to this movement.

His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to teaching children. As a former teacher he had seen how children would be taught using English textbooks. He believed that Americans should learn from American books and so began writing ‘A Grammatical Institute of the English Language’ This consisted of a speller (1783), a grammar (1784) and a reader (1785). These books went on to be used in American schools and his ‘blue-back speller’ books taught five generations of children how to spell (incorrectly!) And it wasn’t just jewellery he decided to change. He preferred s to c in words like defense. He changed ‘re’ at the end of words to ‘er’ like in centre. He dropped ‘l’s and ‘u’s’ all over the place. He also tried to change ‘tongue’ to ‘tung’ but it never caught on.

Before I started ranting about how he can’t just go meddling with language I decided to see where the English got the word to find out who’s version is closest to the truth. The word jewellery is derived from the word jewel, no surprises there but the word jewel is actually taken from the French word ‘jouel’ around the 13th century. So there’s the first example of the spelling being changed. When I delved a little further I found that the word jouel is taken from the Latin word ‘jocale’. The nice thing about this word is that it means play thing.

There you have it, the history of the word jewellery. So every time your computer tells you to spell ‘centre’ as ‘center’ or ‘colour’ as ‘color’ you can blame my good friend Mr Webster. The other things you can blame Mr Webster for are the Webster dictionary and spelling bees. Now that I know the origin of the word and how’s it’s changed over history I’m happy to ignore my spell check safe in the knowledge that I’m doing my bit to preserve the language!

About

Jewellery Designer based in Cork, Ireland. Since finishing my Masters in design over ten years ago, I have worked as a Silver & Goldsmith creating unique jewellery, Wedding & Engagement Rings and Sculptural commissions. Read more about what I do here.